Michelle, your honesty has made every woman’s pain easier to bear
STUFF goes wrong. The human body is complex and mysterious, so it’s inevitable that from time to time, it doesn’t work properly. Luckily, for most of us, most of the time, our bodies’ shortcomings, failings and flaws are minor afflictions easily treated – and the worst we feel is frustrated that they happened in the first place. I’m always disappointed that I get so many colds. Given how much I run and work out, I feel a little hard done by that I now have arthritis in my right big toe. I was born with a minor kidney abnormality that I need to be vigilant about. But even taking the sum of those parts into consideration, I can’t say that I look in the mirror and feel that my body has made me a failure.
But I have done just that. Like most women who have suffered miscarriage, I felt that it was my fault. Something I had done, something I should have done, something my body should have managed better. The pregnancy failed because I failed.
Michelle Obama failed too. Speaking ahead of the publication of her memoir, the 54-year-old former First Lady has revealed for the first time that she suffered a miscarriage more than 20 years ago and that she subsequently conceived her two daughters through IVF. Of her miscarriage, she told an American TV interviewer: ‘I felt lost and alone, and I felt like I failed because I didn’t know how common miscarriages were, because we don’t talk about them.’
Kathryn Thomas, who gave birth to a healthy baby girl earlier this year, has described how she felt ‘defeated’ when she suffered two miscarriages during a prolonged attempt to get pregnant. And last year, Serena Williams almost died after giving birth by caesarean section in a US hospital.
Right now, there are women staring at themselves in the mirror and seeing failures. Women who are struggling to conceive, women who have given up trying to conceive. Women who have suffered miscarriages or birth complications. Women who have had caesarean sections when they desperately wanted a natural birth. We look in the mirror and we don’t think of a hugely successful, whip-smart woman who made history by becoming the first black First Lady. We don’t think of a tennis champion who is the greatest athlete in history. We don’t think of the super-fit, super-healthy Irish woman who is poster girl for both Operation Transformation and Ireland’s Fittest Family. All we see is our own failures.
Which is why it’s really important for women like Michelle Obama, like Kathryn Thomas and Serena Williams, to speak out about their own difficulties with fertility, pregnancy and childbirth. Because if these apparently magnificent, confident, successful examples of womanhood can ‘fail’ too, isn’t it just possible that the struggles so many of us go through in our childbearing years isn’t failure at all?
Michelle Obama says she’s sharing her obstetric history now because she wants to let other women know how universal the experience of miscarriage is. ‘We sit in our own pain, thinking that somehow we’re broken. That’s one of the reasons why I think it’s important to talk to young mothers about the fact that miscarriages happen.’
CONCEPTION, pregnancy and childbirth will always be the most emotional time of women’s lives. Even women who choose not to have children appreciate how that choice is made through a labyrinth of emotions and hormones. I’ve sat beside friends and colleagues and held their hands as they cried and cried over IVF cycles that didn’t work, over future IVF cycles they couldn’t afford. I have been in a hospital ward with other women who had miscarried and I can testify that it’s one of the saddest rooms I’ve ever been in. I watched my premature daughter lie in an incubator in an intensive care unit and considered all the ways I had caused that to happen. And for shame, I have looked down on my big, beautiful, newborn son suckling at my breast for the first time and because I had just had another C-section, I have felt like a failure.
We’re none of us failures. If we break a bone, we don’t beat ourselves up. If we catch a cold, we don’t consider ourselves lesser mortals. Stuff goes wrong – and when it comes to the extraordinary, complicated business of procreation, then the capacity for stuff to go wrong is even higher. And it can happen to anybody. Even to the strongest bodies in the world.
The Obamas have said that one of their greatest regrets is that they didn’t get ObamaCare embedded in the US health system during their time in the White House. Maybe now, by sharing her own difficulties with fertility and childbirth with the millions of women who, like her, like me, have considered themselves failures, then Michelle Obama might just have done a far greater service.